It’s a beautiful, if cold, crisp day. We’ve been hard at work. This morning we were working indoors so this afternoon we decided to take a break from the mundane things of this morning and set to in the garden.

I’ve been digging in the veggie plot and worrying about chickens sneezing (I NEVER stop worrying about one thing or another). I’ve turned over another couple of metres of ground and the hens have been dicing with death by fork in the head. They’ve been jumping on the clods of earth picking out the fat worms before I’ve finished smashing off soil from the roots of the grass and weeds.

While I’ve been doing this, the dogs have been frolicking. They’ve been charging around playing with one another in the sunshine before Archie got down to the serious business of stick whittling and rolling in the grass. I think, given that I’ve also taken them into the field so Rosie could play tennis and Arch could stare at the dry stone walls, that on balance they’ve had a good day despite being largely left to their own devices this morning. They’re both curled up at my feet as I type so I’m pretty sure they are happy, satisfied dogs tonight.

With pandemonium going on all around, David has been playing with one of his toys – a shredder. He’s been shredding bits of tree that were chopped off last weekend to make way for our somewhat feeble attempts to fortify an area for the fat bottomed girls so they can hopefully be protected against contact with wild birds and hence the bird flu virus. Who knows if we will win that battle – I sure hope so.

Stopping work for a few moments to go inside for water, I noticed the sun on this gate, which is the boundary between two of our garden’s ‘rooms’. We have dry stone walls all around the garden and strangely one splitting the garden in two as well. There are gates at either end of the ‘internal’ wall, both of which are a bit tatty but very beautiful if you see what I mean. Given my talk of the secret garden last night, I thought this was quite a good follow-on, even though it’s not actually leading into the secret garden in reality.

Last year I'd been to see the Beat and I was ranting about black!